Johann von Komorzynski, Der Werth in der isolirten Wirthschaft (1889)

This single-author theoretical monograph, dedicated to Carl Menger, develops a value theory for an isolated economy before exchange and price. Its scope is systematic rather than historical: Komorzynski first reconstructs the economy as an ordered stock of scarce useful forces, then criticizes earlier German use-value theory and Menger’s formulation, and finally proposes his own account of value as a quantitative relation among durable, recurrent economic powers.

Insoferne die Zweckbestimmung der nutzbaren Kräfte für die Bedürfnisbefriedigung durch das Verhältniss der Mengenbeschränkung dieser Kräfte in der dargelegten einen und anderen Hinsicht beeinflusst wird, gewinnt sie wirtschaftlichen Charakter.

English translation: Insofar as the purposive allocation of useful forces to the satisfaction of wants is influenced by the relation of the quantitative limitation of these forces in the one and the other respect set forth, it takes on an economic character.

Scarcity is therefore not merely a condition of exchange but the origin of economic ordering itself. Komorzynski’s decisive move is to refuse any simple one-to-one mapping of goods to needs. Goods enter production jointly, often yield joint products, and stand in dense reciprocal relations. Thus cost cannot be cleanly decomposed into separable contributions of individual inputs, nor can goods be sorted into isolated “need groups.”

Das Product ist stets ungetheilt das Ergebnis der Wirksamkeit der aufgewandten Produktionsmittel.

English translation: The product is always, undivided, the result of the joint action of the means of production employed.

The early chapters build from this proposition toward a general equilibrium image of an isolated economy. Needs are continuous, recurring, or durable; consequently the stock of goods must be arranged so that consumed products are continually reproduced. This is the basis of the book’s central construction: the “Beharrungszustand,” or stationary condition of the goods-stock.

Dieses Gesetz des Bedürfnisses, welches dasjenige der Stetigkeit genannt werden kann, fordert eine stetige Wirksamkeit der Befriedigungsmittel der Bedürfnisse.

English translation: This law of want, which may be called the law of continuity, demands a continuous efficacy of the means of satisfying wants.

Komorzynski then examines disturbances and transformations. Temporary losses of a good do not simply destroy the satisfaction directly assigned to it; the economy reallocates goods and substitutes uses, shifting loss toward less urgent satisfactions where possible. Permanent changes, by contrast, require a new ordering of the whole economy. This distinction prepares his critique of value theories that infer value from the loss of a single concrete good.

The polemical section is central. The older German Gebrauchswerth school is credited with seeing value as grounded in the relation of goods to needs, but faulted for treating value as a generic utility of kinds of goods and for assuming that each kind of good corresponds to a determinate kind of need. Menger receives more respectful treatment: he corrects the “Gattungswerth” error and bases value on dependence of want-satisfaction upon concrete goods. Yet Komorzynski argues that Menger still overextends value to single temporally limited goods, whose loss produces heterogeneous, contingent disturbances not fit for strict quantitative comparison.

The final thesis narrows value to steady useful forces: natural powers with continuing efficacy, and recurring quantities of produced goods within the stationary economy.

Indem sich nun diese drei Zielpunkte im Zwecke der Wirthschaft vereinigen, läßt sich der Werth seinem Wesen nach als die Bedeutung stetig wirksamer nutzbarer Kräfte für den Zweck der Wirthschaft bezeichnen.

English translation: Inasmuch as these three points of reference unite in the purpose of the economy, value can, in its essence, be designated as the significance of continuously effective useful forces for the purpose of the economy.

Value is thus not the utility of an isolated object, nor its labor-cost, nor its exchange power. It is the economic significance of a durable or recurrent useful force for the whole plan of want-satisfaction. Quantification becomes possible only because different steady forces can be compared by asking what least-urgent satisfactions would be permanently lost if each disappeared.

Die Größenbestimmung des Wertes besteht in der Gleichsetzung derjenigen Größenmaße stetig wirksamer Nußkräfte verschiedener Art, denen die gleiche Bedeutung für die in der Wirthschaft erreichbare Bedürfnisbefriedigung zukommt.

English translation: The determination of the magnitude of value consists in equating those quantitative measures of continuously effective useful forces of different kinds which have the same significance for the satisfaction of wants attainable within the economy.

This also makes value relative to the entire economy: the same good may have different value in different stocks of available forces, and value ratios need not remain constant across larger quantities. The work’s relevance lies in its unusually rigorous extension and correction of Austrian marginalist themes: substitution, complementarity, joint production, and the whole-stock basis of valuation. Its most original conceptual move is to deny that value belongs, strictly speaking, to one-time goods outside the stationary reproductive order.

Die Vorstellung vom Werthe läßt sich hiernach auf die Güter nur insoferne beziehen, als dieselben Bestandtheile des im Beharrungszustande befindlichen Güterbestandes der Wirthschaft darstellen und es liegt der Vorstellung vom Werthe stets die Betrachtung des Gleichgewichtszustandes der Wirthschaft zu Grunde.

English translation: The conception of value can accordingly be applied to goods only insofar as they constitute components of the stock of goods of the economy in its steady state; and the conception of value is always grounded in a consideration of the state of equilibrium of the economy.